This spring, a coalition of parents, teachers and administrators rallied outside Roseville Avenue Elementary School to protest the school’s slated closing at the end of the academic year. Roseville Avenue School, in Newark, New Jersey, is housed in a 130 year-old building. It has no gym, no auditorium, and no air conditioning. In the past three years, critical teaching positions at Roseville were cut, including a lead science teacher and a bi-lingual teacher. Despite persistent challenges of high student turnover and limited funds, state superintendent Cami Anderson named one of the top eight high performing/high growth schools in New Jersey in 2012. Just one year later, the school was set to close on the purported basis of poor academic performance and under-enrollment. But parents strongly support the neighborhood school, which has a small, supportive staff that works closely to determine educational needs of the community…

It’s the case that won’t go away, that of the Monks of Tibhirine (Algeria), killed and then beheaded in March, 1996. Among the most gruesome killings in recent times, no U.S. administration in the past 17 years has deigned it important enough to press either Algeria or France to investigate.

To the contrary, the brutality of the Algerian government during the 1990s seems to have greatly impressed Washington policymakers. Washington might talk the talk of human rights and democracy, but the U.S. has a long and sordid list of close allies who specialize in various and demented forms of mass repression, from Pinochet in Chile and the Argentinian generals, to Mobutu of the Congo, Mubarek of Egypt, Sharon of Israel, the Shah of Iran and the ‘Kings’ of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, just to name a few of the usual suspects.

Now add the Algeria to the list.

Downplayed, but no secret, since 9/11, the United States has entered into a growing, if not solid strategic partnership with Algeria. It’s a curious alliance given the public political feuding between a North Africa government that publicly considered itself ‘anti-imperialist’ or ‘anti-colonial’ and the behemoth of modern neo-colonialism since World War II’s end, the United States.

How else to explain the silence this side of the Atlantic concerning the beheading of the seven gentle souls, by all accounts deeply appreciated by local Algerians who knew them? It could undermine the strategic hand-holding, upset the relationship vital for U.S. growing interest and strategic control of northern Africa, from Algeria to Nigeria with its extensive deposits of oil, natural gas, uranium and the like. In the same manner and for the same reasons, here in the US we tend to hear little of the Nigerian government’s human rights violation. Funny how that works!

The US-Algerian “Deal”

In today’s world, Algeria and the United States are nothing less than birds of a feather and they most definitely flock together. The US opens doors for Algeria internationally; Algeria opens doors for Bush and Obama regionally. For the United States, Algeria has become its eyes and ears in northern Africa – the Magreb, the Sahara, the Sahel – regions where frankly despite U.S satellite and drone intelligence, Washington hardly has a clue as to what is going on, on the ground. For its part, Algeria gets some communication and high-tech weaponry toys in return, but actually something far more important – international credibility, credibility that its government was fast losing as the country’s civil war of the 1990s drew to its bloody close.

Part of ‘the deal’ includes downplaying the growing voices, allegations of government crimes against the Algerian people during the 1990s and unexplained gruesome incidents like the Tihirine killings. The Algeria civil war was very low on the U.S. media radar and was hardly reported in the United States while it was transpiring. What news that did filter in reflected the Algerian government’s version of those events. Still there is something about war crimes – they don’t go away, not like their perpetrators hope. Ten, fifteen, fifty years later, the voices of victims from their mass graves, torture chambers, those dropped from helicopters into the oceans, still percolate back to the surface.

The Tibhirine Monk Massacre

So it is with the monks of Tibhirine, who were, truth be told, a tiny part of a much more extensive horror story that took the lives of hundreds of thousands of others, victims of Algeria’s dirty war. Virtually unknown in the USA, the case of the Tibhirine monks refuses to die in France and continues to haunt the ruling circles of Algeria as well, the latter dominated by the military and the country’s powerful security apparatus.

But then ‘it’ – the kidnapping, slaughter and decapitation of seven Trappist monks from the monastery at Tibhirine – was one of the more gruesome acts of Algeria’s ‘Dirty War’, the civil war which wracked the country during most of the decade of the 1990s. The Trappist monks were among the 250,000 or so killed, although the exact figure will probably never be known. Only the heads remain; neither the bodies nor their possible whereabouts have been identified. What in French is called the Groupe Islamique Armee (the Armed Islamic Group) or G.I.A claimed responsibility.

Questions remain, especially concerning the possible infiltration of the G.I.A. by the Algerian security apparatus who very well might have actually run the group and directed its activities pressing the G.I.A. to commit a series of gruesome acts, including the massacre of the Tibhirine monks, in an effort to discredit the opposition movement, make them appear like monsters that need to be exterminated, as political dialogue is out of the question.

To what degree was the Algerian government complicit in the Tibhirine killings? Did they actually direct the operation? To what degree was French intelligence that had close ties with their Algerian counterparts at the very least aware of this gruesome operation (as well as many others)? These are the questions that do not go away, and once again, emerge in the public sphere.

As reported recently in the Irish Times, in France, seventeen years after the seven Trappist monks were kidnapped and killed, their decapitated heads left smiling by a small country roadside, families of the victims have asked French President Francois Hollande to fulfill a campaign promise to press the Algerian government to cooperate with the investigation. There is an ongoing investigation of the case in France, headed up by an anti-terrorist judge, Marc Trévidic, but it has been stalled for years due to lack of cooperation from both the French and Algerian governments.

Trévidic wants to interview some 20 Algerians, among them members of the government in power at the time of the murders; he also is asking for an autopsy to determine whether the decapitations took place either at the time of the killings or afterwards. To date, Algiers has been less than enthusiastic about replying, although the ailing Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika promised to cooperate although nothing has happened since.

Up From the Grave They Arise…Again and Again

Both French and Algerian government circles would like the case to simply run out of steam and disappear. Not likely. Besides the families of the victims, still unsatisfied with the explanations given by the Algerian government, the Order of the Friars Minor – known more commonly as the Franciscans – continue to pursue the case. There have been several documentaries and books, mostly in French but also in English. Doubts continue to grow that the official version of events reflects what actually happened.

The most damning evidence – evidence that implicates both the Algerian government of the time and to a lesser degree, France – comes from two former members of the Algerian intelligence apparatus, the Departement de Renseignement et de la Securite (DRS). Habib Souaidia was an officer in the DRS’ special forces unit charged with countering Islamic terrorism who now enjoys political refugee status in France.

The other intelligence officer, Mohammed Samraoui, became the No. 2 man in the DRS’s counter-intelligence unit. He quit and sought political asylum in Germany after being asked to organize the assassination of an Algerian Islamicist living in Germany, whom Samraoui knew had nothing to do with the Islamist guerilla movement.

Of the ruthless methods the DRS would use against its opponents, real and imagined, Samraoui would write:

At least from 1994 onward, I was able to confirm that the leadership of the DRS habitually tortured and killed their fellow citizens, as if they were simple insects. Once committed to this cycle of violence, it became perfectly logical that the generals would use massacres as a tactic to regulate the political problems that befell them in 1997 (1)

In a book published slightly earlier, by Decouverte Press in 2002 (in French), La sale guerre (The Dirty War), Habib Souaidia claims that many, if not most, of the Islamic terrorist groups in Algeria in the 1990s were both infiltrated by the DRS as well as literally run by them, prime among them the G.I.A. mentioned above. Running the G.I.A. operations from his Algiers office was Smail Lamari, Deputy Director of the DRS and in charge of operations of its military wing, known as the Securite Militaire, or SM.

Many of these ‘operations’ were ‘false flag’ operations, operations secretly conceived and implemented by the Algerian government itself, with the knowledge of the ruling clique to make the country’s Islamic movement look far worse than it was in actual fact. Committing acts of brutality, in actual fact carried out by the government, but in the name of Islamic militants helped to isolate the Islamic movement at the time from its popular base, provoke intense fear among a population that would then ask for stronger security measures, i.e., a more repressive hold on the country by the state.

At the time of the Tibhirine murders, Souaidia was serving a four-year sentence on trumped-up charges of having stolen automotive material from avmilitary warehouse, but it was because of his refusal to continue to participate in the Dirty War which was the more probably cause of his incarceration. La sale guerre does not discuss the Tibhirine murders but it cast doubts over the Algerian government’s official explanation of the murders, suggesting that, like so many others, that this was some kind of false flag operation manipulated by the Algerian state itself through the DRS, in this case with the goal of undermining talks of a political settlement then taking place in Rome.

While none of this directly implicates the Algerian DRS in the Tibhirine murders, still it is suggestive of the lengths to which the Algerian counter-intelligence operation was willing to go. In the decades since other suggestions challenging the government’s official version of the Tibhirine events have surfaced, among them French intelligence complicity with their Algerian counterparts, certainly enough ‘smoke’ to suggest that somewhere there is a fire and to merit a serious investigation.

Consequences of Tibhirine

If all the details of the Tibhirine massacres remain under wraps, the consequences are not at all ambiguous. As Louis Aggoun and Jean-Baptiste Rivoire wrote of the Tibhrine tragedy in Francalgerie, crimes et mensonges d’Etats:

In attacking Christianity in its very heart and soul, the assassination of the monks traumatized France, still ‘the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church’,(1) discredited the Islamicists that much more, re mobilizing the West (France, USA, UK, Germany etc.) in support of a harder anti-Islamicist position(2) at a time when a negotiated settlement between the warring parties was being considered in Rome’.(3)

What Algeria’s generals feared most at the time was a negotiated settlement with Algeria’s Islamicists that would threaten their hold on power and the oil wealth that comes with it. Aggoun and Rivoire’s analysis, while not proving Algerian DRS management of the Tibhirine killings, still gives a viable political explanation for why the Algerian government might have acted as it did.

As has been the case, frankly for decades, a fierce, under the surface power struggle in Algeria, is unfolding, ‘the battle of the clans’ as it is often referred to although in this case, the ‘clans’ as they are called in French are more accurately called in English ‘interest groups’. The DRS and the military (although there are some differences between the two) have held the reins of power for decades, their power consolidated just before the Dirty War began and continuing until today.

On the other hand, there is the president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika and his circle who have, rather unsuccessfully it appears, tried to wrest power from the security- intelligence apparatus. Other presidents who tried were either assassinated (Boudiaf) or unceremoniously pushed aside (Zeroual) when their usefulness had run its course, or when they decided to challenge the powers that be. It is not entirely inconceivable that the Tibhirine monks’ massacre could emerge as an issue in this power struggle as the power struggle gets dirtier. It already is pretty intense.

Regardless, the case of the Tibhirine monks is essentially only kept alive due to popular pressure especially in France and Algeria. It is time the U.S. human rights movement adds its voice to the chorus demanding an explanation, justice in this case. That it might embarrass the U.S. government some, the French government more and the Algerian government most of all should have little bearing on case.

Obama is finally showing us he is willing to fight – on coal, on tar sands, and on climate. His apparent willingness to challenge the climate impacts of coal and tar sands – after years of silence on both topics – is cause for some celebration.

President Obama’s speech at Georgetown University was a milestone on climate change. It is a milestone in two ways. First, he made it clear he is not afraid to tackle coal as the primary culprit in climate change. Second, he made a major pivot in how he framed the Keystone XL pipeline debate. He’s no longer talking about “energy security” or “jobs” when talking about the pipeline but instead linking “our national interest” with whether or not the pipeline would have a significant impact on the changing climate.

Virtually all climate scientists who have weighed in on the Keystone XL pipeline agree that tar sands oil, if exploited, would result in a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions. NASA’s former top scientist, James Hansen, said it would be “game over” for the climate if the pipeline went forward.

But more significantly, Obama signaled in this speech that he is ready to use his executive authority, and not willing to compromise on two key things: the climate impacts of coal and tar sands.

He made a major pronouncement in stating that public financing of coal should end, such as financing via agencies such as U.S. Export-Import Bank.

The Institute for Policy Studies was the first organization, together with Friends of the Earth, to document the significant climate impacts of U.S. Export-Import Bank and Overseas Private Investment Corporation’s fossil fuel investments in 1998. That research resulted in a lawsuit filed by Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and the City of Boulder challenging both of those public financial institutions with violations under the National Environmental Protection Act, for not calculating the cumulative emissions of their projects on the global climate. Obama’s statement today takes that research and legal action one step further and calls for an end to almost all U.S. government funding of coal overseas. The White House statement released today says:

“…The President calls for an end to U.S. government support for public financing of new coal plants overseas, except for (a) the most efficient coal technology available in the world’s poorest countries in cases where no other economically feasible alternative exists, or (b) facilities deploying carbon capture and sequestration technologies. As part of this new commitment, we will work actively to secure the agreement of other countries and the multilateral development banks to adopt similar policies as soon as possible.”

While this statement allows for some wiggle room on coal – if the carbon produced from the coal can be captured, which currently is not financially or technically feasible – it would eliminate U.S. backing of coal financing in countries like India and South Africa, both of which have recently received billions of public dollars for massive coal-fired coal plants.

Obama also said he would encourage developing countries to transition to natural gas as they move away from coal, a posture consistent with what he is calling for at home. Such a statement is unfortunate as it encourages the expansion of fracking on U.S. lands, which results in fugitive methane emissions, water contamination, and health problems for nearby communities. The low price of natural gas, while welcome as a replacement for coal, is making truly clean and renewable energy less attractive financially.

Obama also continues to support nuclear power – a surprising posture in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns, a disaster that is transforming Japan, causing it to shut down its nuclear power plants and replace them with renewable energy.

And Obama was unafraid to call out the climate deniers – the “flat earth society” – and shame them, while urging the public to “invest, divest,” a statement sure to warm the hearts of students and faith groups across the country, who are urging their institutions to divest their endowments of fossil fuels.

But the significance of this speech is that Obama is finally showing us he is willing to fight – on coal, on tar sands, and on climate. Obama remains an “all of above” champion who believes he can simultaneously frack and drill our country’s oil and gas resources and solve the climate crisis. But his apparent feistyness and willingness to challenge the climate impacts of coal and tar sands – after years of silence on both topics – is cause for some celebration.

I arrived at the Supreme Court a half hour before decision time, only to wade into a sea of rainbow, red, white, and blue.

The last time I was here was in March. Bundled into my coat and scarf, I joined a demonstration outside the court as opening arguments were heard in Windsor vs. United States and Hollingsworth vs. Perry. They’re also known as the anti-DOMA and Anti-Prop 8 cases.

This time, the crowd dripped with sweat as we waited in frenzied anticipation for the decisions to be handed down.

Signs ranged from admonishing, (“SCOTUS, Try to Be Less Wrong Today”) to comically threatening, (“If I Can’t Marry My Boyfriend, I’ll Marry Your Daughter”) to simply powerful (“Gay Rights ARE Human Rights” and “Love Conquers All,” among others). One man carried an actual closet door on which he’d painted, “This Used to Oppress Me. Down with DOMA — No More Shut Doors.”

Not all the demonstrators supported marriage equality. One man stood behind a giant “Repent or Perish” sign. Another booed us from a passing trolley.

But these bigoted voices were drowned out by honking cars and cheering people of all kinds: Ministers and rabbis, Democrats and Republicans alike held pro-marriage signs.

The sun beat down, minutes crept damply by, and we waited. When not being shooed off the courthouse steps by police, the crowd sang “God Bless America” and “Goin’ to the Chapel,” or chanted “Equality now!”

In

Photo by Kathleen Robin Joyce

the shuffle of the crowd, I ended up next to a woman named Mary, who had driven down here the night before from New York, along with her partner, to be at the court to witness history.

Suddenly, a wave of cheering and screaming broke over the assembled masses. Like nearly everyone at the court, Mary’s partner had SCOTUSblog on her phone, which was how I learned that DOMA was declared unconstitutional. Mary cried and kissed her partner. I got goosebumps and screamed my throat raw.

Mary’s partner translated the legalese of the opinion into plain English for us — the Supreme Court has declared DOMA unconstitutional, by a ruling of 5 to 4, on the basis of the Fifth Amendment.

The majority opinion says, “DOMA singles out a class of persons deemed by a State entitled to recognition and protection to enhance their own liberty.”

The crowd was ecstatic, and with good reason. Many feared that the decision would be drawn narrowly, striking down DOMA, but declaring marriage equality a state issue. But now, the justices actually recognized LGBT people as a minority being persecuted by hateful legislation.

We were hardly deflated when, as expected, the court also ruled that the plaintiffs in Perry didn’t have standing to challenge Prop 8. Let it go back to the lower court! DOMA is dead!

Kathleen Robin Joyce is a student at Georgetown University and an OtherWords intern at the Institute for Policy Studies. OtherWords.org

You’ve heard of planned obsolescence — tactical nuclear weapons are a case of deferred obsolescence: a weapon that has long ago worn out its welcome in the U.S. arsenal. On June 6, in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Steve Andreasen, a consultant for the Nuclear Threat Initiative, wrote:

“Throughout the Cold War, thousands of tactical nuclear weapons — short-range nuclear artillery shells, missiles and bombs — were deployed by the United States to deter the Soviets from exploiting their advantages in Europe to mount a lightning attack. … After the Soviet Union collapsed, President George H. W. Bush ordered the return of almost all U.S. tactical nuclear weapons, leaving only a few hundred air-delivered gravity bombs — the B61 — in European bunkers.

“… Politically, however, there are still voices that argue that even a bomb with no military utility is ‘reassuring’ to certain allies, and that storing this artifact in European bunkers and maintaining allied aircraft capable of dropping this bomb is a valuable demonstration of NATO ‘burden sharing.’ Moreover, these proponents are prepared to pay — or rather, have the U.S. pay — $10 billion to modernize and store the B61.”

But to a state such as Pakistan, tactical nuclear weapons present an exciting new addition to their arsenal for which they may have big plans. At his Foreign Policy blog Best Defense, Tom Ricks interviews Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state during the George W. Bush administration. He said that Pakistan is

“… now are looking at tactical nuclear weapons.” [Their fear, Armitage said, is that if there is another Mumbai-like attack, India will respond with a corps-sized attack on Pakistan.] “Tactical nukes is what you’d use against a corps.” [This might provoke India to escalate further.] “But Pakistan would say that its tactical nukes would deter that.” [Brackets are Ricks’s.]

“ … to dissuade India from contemplating conventional punitive retaliation to … cross-border terrorist strikes such as the horrific 26/11 attack on Mumbai. What Pakistan is signalling to India and to the world is that India should not contemplate retaliation even if there is another Mumbai because Pakistan has lowered the threshold of nuclear use to the theatre level. … This is nothing short of nuclear blackmail.”

What Pakistan is “signaling” to me is that it doesn’t want to feel compelled to stay the hand of its Islamist militants, who it’s long viewed as its wild card. (That’s making the generous assumption that the army and/or ISI won’t be complicit in a future militant attack on India.) Instead, Pakistan is making contingency plans for the retaliation from India that it expects. But, is the luxury of keeping militants around worth developing and maintaining tactical nukes to clean up their messes? That’s some skewed calculus.

“India will not be the first to use nuclear weapons, but if it is attacked with such weapons, it would engage in nuclear retaliation which will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage on its adversary. The label on a nuclear weapon used for attacking India, strategic or tactical, is irrelevant from the Indian perspective. … “A limited nuclear war is a contradiction in terms. Any nuclear exchange, once initiated, would swiftly and inexorably escalate to the strategic level.”

In other words, not only wouldn’t India be deterred from retaliating by Pakistan’s tactical – once called “battlefield” – nukes, it would retaliate with strategic – your garden-variety, apocalyptic – nukes! This whole business is riddled with opportunities for miscommunication that could result in an all-out nuclear war. In October 2012, George Perkovich explained in a Stimson Center report, about which I posted a month later.

Many worry about Islamist militants acquiring proprietorship of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. But the greater risk, according to Perkovich, is the confusion that India experiences in situations such as when its parliament was attacked in New Delhi in 2001 and during the Mumbai 2008 assault. Thus the nuclear deterrence model, which, according to conventional thinking, worked for the United States and Russia, may not be universally applicable. Why?

Perkovich writes that, “when it comes to … initiating and managing warfare between nuclear-armed states, it is generally assumed that a tight, coherent line of authority” is S.O.P. Otherwise “the implications for deterrence stability are profound.”

For example, if

… India is attacked by [Islamist militants] emanating from Pakistan and with ties to Pakistani intelligence services, [India] naturally infers that such actions represent the intentions and policies of Pakistani authorities. … If Pakistan does not … detain and prosecute the perpetrators … pressure mounts for India to demonstrate through force that it will [retaliate].

Perkovich presents this scenario.

For example, while India could perceive that the terrorist attacks it attributes to Pakistan signal Pakistani aggressiveness, Pakistani leaders [may only have intended the] initial terrorist attacks as a signal that the Pakistani state does not seek a wider conflict but [merely seeks] to press India to make political accommodations, in Kashmir or more broadly.

… This signaling process becomes all the more difficult and precarious if the Pakistani leaders who are presumed to be the authors of Pakistan’s signals and actions deny that the [terrorists] actually do manifest the policies of the state.

In that case …

Indian leaders then face a highly unstable dilemma. They could act as if the initial violence reflects the intentions of Pakistan’s chain of command, and send … signals of retaliatory action according to normal models of deterrence.

But this might only confuse Pakistan. Perkovich explains (emphasis added).

… if Pakistani leaders believe or claim that the perpetrators were not carrying out state policies, and India does escalate, Pakistani leaders will feel that India is the aggressor.

It becomes obvious that not knowing on whose authority an Islamist extremist attack on India was mounted

… produces dangerous confusion and ambiguity that interfere in the management of deterrence. Who is sending signals through violence that is perceived to be emanating from the state and/or its territory? What is being signaled?

In the end

… disunity erodes the rationality on which deterrence is predicated.

Returning to Ms. Bagchi and tactical nukes, she writes that another reason Pakistan developed them is

… to keep its weapons from being confiscated or neutralized by the US, a fear that has grown in the Pakistani establishment in the wake of the operation against Osama bin Laden.

In a recent ebook, historian Agha Humayun Amin, a former major in the Pakistani Tank Corps, confirms this.

The Pakistani military perception right from 2001 was that the USA was a threat for Pakistan’s nuclear program and US arrival in Afghanistan had more to do with Pakistan and less with the Taliban. Therefore the Taliban had to be supported. As long as the Americans were busy with the Taliban, Pakistan or Pakistani nuclear assets were safe.

“When the U.S. says that they are worried about the security [of] Pakistan’s nuclear arms, it means it fears that these might fall in the hands of such elements as the extremist Taliban,” said a commentary published by Pakistan’s Frontier Post in late 2011. “However, when [former Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood] Qureshi says so, he means that these are in danger of being whisked away by the U.S. armed forces.”

This week in OtherWords, Julian Bond calls on Congress to fix the mistakes the Supreme Court made in its ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act. Given that our cartoonist Khalil Bendib had so masterfully illustrated the many ways that voting rights were under attack long before the majority’s Shelby County v. Holder ruling came out, we’re reprising two of his earlier cartoons on this topic. One accompanies Bond’s commentary and the other goes with a column I wrote with William A. Collins. We’ve also got a new editorial cartoon regarding genetically engineered crops.

As always, our commentaries and cartoons are available for use at no charge in newspapers and new media under a Creative Commons license. Editors may find information about that on our website or contact me with any questions at OtherWords[ AT ]ips-dc.org. If you haven’t already subscribed to our weekly newsletter, please do.

An Endangered Species Up in Arms / Don KrausThe number of students taking humanities courses is plummeting, and financing for liberal arts education is being tea-partied to death.

Runaway CEO Pay Gets a Free Pass / Sam PizzigatiThe House Financial Services Committee has just moved to repeal the only statutory provision now on the books that puts real heat on overpaid top executives.

The former East Germany’s Stasi used similar justifications as the U.S. for total surveillance.

Stasi detention facility

If recent revelations have led Americans to question how the United States defines freedom, Germans are questioning how the United States defines friendship. Turmoil surrounding PRISM’s overseas snooping has pushed the protection of privacy to the front of Germany’s agenda, imperiling German-U.S. relations. The American National Security Agency has been able to access data clouds in Europe for the last five years, which is news to most European citizens, although the European Parliament has known since 2011. In Germany, outrage is boiling as many begin to reassess the German-American relationship.

Since the end of World War II, Germany and the United States have enjoyed a relative closeness and codependency and are often described as a partnership, marriage, or friendship. But over the last decade, political rifts over the global economy, the war in Iraq, and America’s civil rights violations have caused this transatlantic love to fade. PRISM’s direct invasion of Europeans’ privacy provides further cleavage between the two Western superpowers.

German government officials, political parties, and news sources have been openly critical of the Obama administration, demanding information and justification. Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger linked the security issue to one of democracy’s fundamental predicaments, explaining that “the more a society monitors, controls and observes its citizens, the less free it is.” She called on Washington to be completely transparent about its motivations for such excessive surveillance in order to resolve the conflict.

During President Obama’s visit to Berlin on June 19, Chancellor Angela Merkel pressed the president for specifics on the NSA’s role in Europe. While Obama’s outline of the NSA’s restricted domain and assertions about its role in terrorism prevention in Germany seemed to reassure Merkel, he’ll have to do much more to win over the rest of the country.

One reason that many Germans aren’t taking the bait is that former East Germans, including Chancellor Merkel herself, liken the invasiveness of PRISM’s techniques to Stasi infiltration. The all-too-recent horror of the German Democratic Republic’s repression hovers in German minds, giving a particularly sinister gleam to the NSA’s operations. The Socialist Unity Party of Germany justified Stasi actions as efforts to preserve state security, a frighteningly similar goal, when taken at face-value, to that of our own security agency. European Parliament member Mark Ferber reported that he “thought this era had ended when the DDR fell.”

With no comparable national experience in the popular American imagination, it seems that the U.S. government is less constrained to value privacy in the same way. The disparity is even embedded in law—the U.S. Constitution does not explicitly provide protection of citizens’ privacy, whereas Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects Germans’ lives, homes, and correspondence from interference by public authorities. The threat that PRISM poses to Germany’s guarantee of privacy protection is frightening to Germans on a deep level that perhaps even the most concerned Americans can’t fully comprehend.

Although Merkel and Obama used the term “friendship” liberally throughout their joint press conference, the term may no longer describe a unity of ideals with regard to human rights. “Is [Obama] a friend?” asks Jakob Augstein at Spiegel Online, observing that “revelations about his government’s vast spying program call that assumption into doubt.”

It is obvious that the German people will not readily sacrifice the privacy that they fought to have, and the United States can either take a page from the German book or retain its current security agenda. But even if the latter becomes agreeable to the American people, NSA persistence overseas may discolor the German-American friendship with pigments of mistrust and reluctance.

Disregarding my own cynicism (I know I should be shocked, shocked!), there is something deeply insidious about the outrage being expressed. Not just the hero-worship or vilification of Edward Snowden. Despite this author’s opinion that, sunlight being the best disinfectant, these leaks are good for the American people, Snowden and the leak process is not the story. The story is the confirmation of an unconstitutional surveillance state to which Americans never consented, never even got the opportunity to debate how many of our civil liberties we’re willing to forgo in the name of security. No, the insidiousness is in the outrage over the surveillance state itself. Now it’s a big deal, now that they’re spying on us. But where was the outrage over Stop And Frisk or any of New York’s other recent surveillance and anti-whistleblowing excesses? Oh, that just happened to Blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims. Where was the outrage when we were openly intercepting the e-mail and phone communication of all non-Americans regardless of probable cause? Oh, that just happened to foreigners, they’re not protected by our laws. These inherently xenophobic reactions, which of course are nothing new, highlight our problem: the surveillance state stops being ok when it goes from racist to all-encompassing.

The surveillance state is not a new problem; it’s a new problem for white people. The surveillance state has been a daily thorn in the lives of New York’s minorities for years, but it’s not just inconvenient. The surveillance state as a racist institution has been destroying the economy of majority-black cities and non-white neighborhoods for decades.

“I Believe In A Better Baltimore,” then-Mayor Martin O’Malley told the city in his 2002 re-election campaign, asking Baltimore to “risk action on faith” as he so eloquently put it. And the city bought his hopeful, inspiring rhetoric. but never asked for a plan, and so voted for the BELIEVE campaign, a multi-million-dollar press bonanza that put O’Malley’s administration in very comfortable approval numbers. By the time he left Baltimore for the Governor’s Mansion in Annapolis, however, the city’s murder and violent crime rates were back to their horrific mid-90’s levels, as were drug and STD rates, the campaign having changed nothing. Well, almost nothing.

Today, the streets of Baltimore are littered with the tattered remnants of the BELIEVE campaign: scratched stickers on newspaper stands and mailboxes, torn banners on the sides of buildings. In fact, aside from the politicians who pepper their speeches with the word, the only aspect of BELIEVE left intact are the blue light boxes that continue to degrade the economies and self-esteem of Baltimore’s poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods. For those not familiar with the blue lights, their purpose is as purportedly noble to city safety as PRISM is to national security. Officially known as Portable Overt Digital Surveillance Systems (PODSS), the flashing camera system was intended to improve security by filming the actions on the corner. The always-on surveillance cameras track sound as well as image, and can identify a resident’s walking patterns and run a program to calculate the likelihood of their criminality. In minority neighborhoods from Baltimore to Chicago, Big Brother is always watching. The best description of their use and impact comes from John Duda at the Indypendent Reader:

… the streets monitored by these cameras have been marked as permanent emergencies, as territories distinct from the “normal” or “good” areas of the city. Rather than addressing these territories as communities of fellow citizens, the cameras address entire blocks as potential criminals, feeding into a logic in which extraordinary regimes of policing and incarceration appear justiï¬ed. The City of Baltimore has installed at least one camera which illustrates this point perfectly: a camera is equipped with a motion detector and a taped recording connected to a loudspeaker; when anyone walks past the apparatus, their picture is taken, and the recording informs them both that they are a criminal and that they have been photographed.

What a blue light on a lamppost means is that you’ve stumbled onto a problem corner. It has come to mean that, if you regrettably find yourself on such a corner after dark, you should lock your doors and not stop at stop signs or even stop lights if possible due to the imminent threat of carjacking or worse. But as gang rates spike with non-violent offenders caught by the POD cameras seeking protection in prison, what the blue lights really mean is that no business will ever enter these areas. While dealers move over one street to evade the camera, no significant investment or purchase will be made here and the legitimate economy of the neighborhood will continue to spiral downward. And as the blue lights destroy Baltimore’s neighborhoods and the potential of their residents, they pay fitting homage to the bluff that crushed a city’s hope, as underneath them are little black boxes labeled very visibly: “BELIEVE.”

It’s worth noting that in San Francisco, a nearly-majority white city (48%), outrage sparked by the implementation of POD systems brought legal changes to curb their impact on civil liberties. Similar challenges in Chicago (35% white) and Baltimore (31% white) have yielded no results and no media attention.

Non-white Americans have been under surveillance, subject to the violence of a police state, their constitutional rights trod upon, for decades. But now white people know that their e-mails are being read, their phone calls recorded by the government. Now the constitutional rights of people with “nothing to hide” are being infringed upon, now it’s a crisis. Welcome to your first glimpse of the America of forty percent of your countrymen.

Zachary Gallant is a Fulbright Fellow in Post-Conflict Redevelopment with an M.A. in International Politics from the University of London, and a recovering Baltimore City political operative. You can follow him on Twitter @ZacharyGallant.

“A Hollywood movie starring Brad Pitt posits a right of return for Arabs and Jews?” asks blogger levi9909 at Jews sans frontieres. An anonymous poster at 1971 Productions blog provides some background on World War Z (with emphasis added and, where applicable, sic):

According to the novel [by Max Brooks, Metropolitan Books, 2006] a key occurance near the beginning of the zombie pandemic takes place in Israel. While every other nation dismisses the zombie threat as a ‘non-news’ item, Israel takes proactive steps with the closing of its borders to everyone except uninfected Jews and Palestinians.

The book details how the state takes steps to protect itself via the building of “The Wall”, turning the nation into a literal prison state. All Israeli, non-Israeli Jews, and Palestinians and descendants of pre-1948 Palestinians who lived abroad, are allowed to return to Israel to live behind this wall after being screened for the disease. Also in order to scale back on the amount of land it has to secure, the government unwillingly pull back from the West Bank and most other areas they had seized, before sealing themselves in.

… the Palestinians and The Jews ‘live happily ever after’ in peace and unity.

An anonymous commenter replied (again, sic):

I’m pretty certain that if zombies were attacking the Middle East, Israel will only let Jews inside its boarders and let the Arabs and the rest of the world die. They will NOT save the Palestinians. Max Brook’s tries to make the Jews the only civilzed nation on the planet, while all the Muslim nations act crazy and die.

In a trailer scene reminiscent of Colson Whitehead’s poignant Zone One (Anchor, 2011), zombies overrun an enormous wall. I had read Brooks’s dazzling novel, but forgot the details, and was wondering where the wall World War Z’s zombies were scaling was located. Upon watching the movie with my son and learning that it was outside Jerusalem, one couldn’t help but draw a comparison with Israel’s West Bank and two Gaza Strip barriers. Nor the obvious analogy of, as some Israelis see it, hordes of Arabs in the form of Palestinians overrunning their country. Meanwhile, evocations of Christians invading during the Crusades made it especially unsettling to see Jerusalem thus ravaged.

I then watched closely to see if those admitted into the walled compound that Jerusalem had become included Arabs. The fast-moving action and dialogue slipped by me and I was unable to pick out Arabs or hear references to their admittance. In any event, it seemed to have underplayed, as opposed to Brooks’s novel, in which the crisis seems to bring out the best in Israelis.

In his novel, however, either to advance the narrative, reflect his political concerns, or both, Brooks took the opportunity to eliminate two “existential” threats to Israel.

From the 1971 post:

… a threatened yet ironically safe Tehran takes a less than proactive step to quell the sudden influx of Pakistani refugees crossing Baluchistan into Iran. With India all but destroyed by the zombie virus, many Pakistanis who cannot fly out of the country see Iran as the next best alternative. Launching a misjudged nuclear strike against Karachi, Pakistan responds to Iran in a likewise manner, ensuring the annihilation of both countries in the process.

Finally, some brief observations about whether the film works. The case can be made that it’s the zombie film to end all zombie films. Whether all those in the interim since George Romero’s 1978 horror classic Night of the Living Dead – which cashed in on a trifecta of powerful drama, genuine shock, and a social conscience – were even necessary is a moot point. World War Z features the revved-up variety of zombies, which amps up the action, but forfeits the suspense inherent in zombies’ traditional slow gait.

Nevertheless, World War Z is an exciting and moving. Furthermore, the much criticized ending might seem tacked on, in part because it’s scaled down from a cast of skatey-eight million. In a Vanity Fair piece about the problem-plagued making of the film, director Marc Foster said of the final scenes: “The maximum amount of actors or human beings on that set were 20.” Some movies start small and end big; others start big and end small, an arguably more satisfying strategy.

They had been on the State Department’s watch list, but were further downgraded in this years’s Trafficking in Persons report.

Secretary of State Kerry at the 2013 Trafficking in Persons Report event.

As a country that will celebrate February 2, 2014 like a national holiday, the United States has cause for some self-evaluation. Super Bowl XLVIII is expected to be responsible for the trafficking of 10,000 prostitutes into New Jersey to meet the influx of fans looking to pay for sex. Yet despite this dark underbelly to one of America’s favorite and most celebrated pastimes, the United States awarded itself a sterling Tier 1 grade in its 2013 Trafficking in Persons report, which was released on June 19.

Less fortunate were China and Russia, both of which were downgraded this year to Tier 3 after a respective nine and eight years on the Tier 2 “watch list.” A Tier 3 designation means a country does not comply with any of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s minimum standards and is not making any efforts to do so, whereas a Tier 2 county has made significant efforts to comply with those standards. A Tier 3 ranking also comes with sanctions, which could include withdrawing non-humanitarian and non-trade aid and halting U.S. participation in any cultural and educational exchange programs, though President Obama has the power to waive these sanctions.

Prior to its release, there had been some discussion as to whether Washington’s political and economic agenda would sway the findings of the report. These speculations are grounded in the government’s decision two years ago to save India — “the demographic epicenter of human trafficking” — from a Tier 3 ranking, which, according to former director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons Mark Lagon, likely had more to do with politics than anti-trafficking efforts. This year, Secretary of State John Kerry demonstrated a commitment to fighting modern day slavery by standing behind fact and no longer delaying the decision to downgrade several major powers to their deserved ranking.

This is not to say that the Trafficking in Persons Report has been without criticism. Representatives from both Russia and China have been extremely outspoken against their country’s demotions. A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman for China disregarded the State Department’s findings, countering that China “has achieved remarkable progress in fighting domestic and transnational trafficking.” She went on to attribute the Tier 3 ranking to Washington’s arbitrary and biased view of China.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry also dismissed the report, characterizing its findings as the result of “unacceptable methodology.” It continued on to mock the idea of following the dictates of another country in combating organized crime and trafficking in Russia. The report, however, describes Russia as lacking “any concrete system for the identification or care of trafficking victims.”

Russia and China, in addition to other Tier 3 countries, have 90 days before non-trade and non-humanitarian related sanctions come into place to prove their commitment to combat trafficking and protect victims.

Also worth noting is that Thailand, a U.S. treaty ally, and Malaysia were notified that without any significant changes, they would be downgraded next year to Tier 3 as well. Several countries, such as Iraq and the Congo, were promoted from the watch list to Tier 2 as recognition for significant strides made this past year.